Linked Citations Courtesy of Researchblogging.org

Mark Davis and several of his colleagues wrote a comment in Nature this month which caught my eye, not because it is a new argument, but because it’s an old argument that drives ecologists and conservation biologists up the wall. The piece, titled “Don’t Judge Species On Their Origins,” argues that we should judge species … Continue reading →

Once a species has invaded, it’s hard to make it disappear again. Therefore, researchers and managers are always looking for ways to manage without micromanaging: they look for patterns in the growth or spread of species that might indicate a threshold of manageability. A well-known case here in Hawaii is the introduction of decorator urchins … Continue reading →

While I was seining with the LAIP interns this past summer, we came across some interesting fish living near the mangroves. While some of the fish and nearly all the invertebrates we’ve seen are species that may spend their entire lives in the pond (the half-spotted goby, for example, or Podopthalmus vigil, the Hawai’ian swimming crab), … Continue reading →

More on the mangrove story: This Tuesday we took sediment cores from two areas where mangrove overstory (prop roots and trunks) were cut down in 2007 and 2008. In these areas, dead stumps still stick out of the mud, and a thick, fibrous root mat stabilizes the sediments. Even though the overstory was removed four … Continue reading →

This weekend we found a sort of sponge raft drifting along the bottom of the pond. Composed of Gracilaria and the orange sponge Mycale sp., the piece was weighed down with sediment and tiny organisms living inside. The contents included two brittle stars, several polychaete worms, a few amphipods, and some mysterious organism (pictured below). Whether the sponge … Continue reading →

Mahalo Nui Loa

I recently graduated from the Donahue Lab at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and am currently a graduate student at the University of Washington. This research is funded by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation, as well a scholarship from the Seattle chapter of the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation.

“Where do ecological ideas come from? …Most do not spring deductively from the minds of ecologists, like Athena from the head of Zeus. Instead, they emerge when ecologists absorb the essential spirit of individual places– their genius loci.”

~Mary V. Price & Ian Billick, "The Ecology of Place"

“Aloha is the intelligence with which we meet life.”

~Olana A'i, Kumu Hula

“I no longer say ‘Hawaiian ways of knowing’ anymore. Because people relegate that to the margins. ‘Ways of knowing,’ as if it’s a quaint, anthropologic way of describing something outside us. No, it’s ‘epistemology,’ the philosophy of knowledge. Land educates. ‘Ike ‘aina. The land of your birth educates you. This land here educates you.”